Slot needs to give Liverpool fans hope in final months of season
If the Reds are going to be a force again next season, they surely need to start showing signs of it towards the end of this campaign.
It has often - and entirely fairly - been pointed out during this disappointing Liverpool campaign that even the great Jurgen Klopp was not immune to a poor season.
Let us not forget that the Reds’ Premier League title defence of 2020-21 was just as disastrous as this one, ending with a 17-point gap to winners Manchester City and no other silverware claimed.
Meanwhile, 2022-23’s high point was victory in the Community Shield in August, with another trophyless slog plus a failure to qualify for the Champions League following.
Things aren’t quite that desperate for Arne Slot yet, with his team still in both the Champions League and FA Cup, and locked in a battle for a top-five finish.
But success on any of those fronts feels like a long shot given the depth of Liverpool’s issues, and so it would be unwise to tie attempts to salvage the season to those outcomes.
Instead, the Dutchman could learn something from the fact that the saving grace of Klopp’s poorest campaigns was that, even if their ultimate aims weren’t always achieved, his teams always finished strongly.
In 2020-21, the Reds somehow managed to sneak into third place in the Premier League by finishing up with a 10-match unbeaten run that included eight wins.
That late-season bounce provided the platform for a largely similar squad to pick up two trophies all while going agonisingly close to winning a quadruple the following season.
And two years later, an 11-match unbeaten run featuring seven wins saw the Reds still narrowly miss out on a top-four finish but, most crucially, lay the foundations for improvement next time around.
Key among them was a tweak to Trent Alexander-Arnold’s positioning that helped Liverpool challenge for the title and win the League Cup in Klopp’s final season.
In both cases, the clear squad issues the German faced made it easy to accept a fallow year, but it was absolutely vital to end well in order to show both that lessons were being learned and that better days lay ahead.
And so if Slot hopes to persuade fans, players, and his superiors to buy into idea that a similar improvement is coming next term, then he could surely do with overseeing a similarly strong finish to this forgettable campaign.
The fact is, the current boss does not have comparable mitigation to Klopp’s worst years, such as losing all of his centre-halves to long-term injury, or the entire midfield going over the hill simultaneously.
The Reds have had some injuries, yes, but hardly a crisis, while signings who arrived needing to adapt to a new environment should be showing their best form and the fruits of the on-pitch relationships they have built by now.
There has also been plenty of time to get to grips with the Premier League’s pivot to greater physicality and set-pieces, even if that caught everyone at the club by surprise.
And, while it would be remiss not to mention the tragic passing of Diogo Jota when mentioning the extenuating circumstances, it also feels unfair and inaccurate to put Liverpool’s multitude of problems all down to that.
Whatever the reasons, this team has so regularly shown its flaws that asking its head coach to guarantee a happy ending in the form of a trophy or even a top-five finish would be folly, not least because not even Klopp managed that in his toughest years.
But, should the season end with Liverpool limping over the line and ensuring this campaign has no redeeming features whatsoever, then it will be trickier for Slot to make the case that he is capable of overseeing the necessary recovery.